As a teenager, I attended the funeral of a friend’s mother, a woman who had died after a long illness. Funerals are never happy occasions and this one was terribly sombre.

Tears streamed down my face and into my shirt collar as I listened to the eulogy that late summer morning. And then at one point, an almost unbearable urge to laugh out loud came over me. I was horrified.

I managed to quash it. But I remember thinking how strange — and how inappropriate — it was to be moved to laughter at such a solemn time.

Maybe sadness and joy were closer to one another than I had allowed, I thought. Yes, we cry when we are sad or angry or frustrated, but we cry tears of joy, too, and of profound relief.

“As everyone knows, there is often a rather fine line between laughing and crying,” the American writer E.B. White once observed.

White, who died in 1985, wrote articles and essays for the New Yorker for more than half a century; he wrote children’s books, including the classic Charlotte’s Web; and edited and updated the 1918 English language style guide The Elements of Style, known to many simply as Strunk & White.

Stuart McLean, the writer, humorist and broadcaster best known as host of the CBC Radio program The Vinyl Café, invoked White’s voice as he introduced the 20th season this month. It was also the start of the 10th year of one of my favourite features of the show: On the Story Exchange, McLean reads true, first-person recollections sent in by listeners — stories that are often funny, sometimes sad, sometimes poignant and, occasionally, all three.

White, he told listeners, had written of “that ineffable place where tears meet laughter, that place where you can’t trust your emotions, where you find yourself falling from one to the other.”

In honour of the anniversary, McLean devoted much of the show to some of his favourites from the Story Exchange.

One of them, sent by Irene Wood of Edmonton, was about a Grade 11 history teacher she’d had, Mr. Fisher: He taught the history of the 20th century in a class called People and Politics. He was physical in his manner, jumping up on his desk to simulate the rat-a-tat-tat of a machine gun during his description of Vimy Ridge, and emotional, his big blue handkerchief never far away. And he wept, for instance, as he read his students an article describing Nelson Mandela’s first hours of freedom after 27 years in prison.

Mr. Fisher was also strict about his students being on time and about their assignments being neatly written. One day, Dennis, a student who was often late and often had his assignments handed back for being messy, came in late and tossed his assignment on the desk. Mr. Fisher grabbed the assignment, tore it up and tossed it in the trash can before starting a tirade against the student in which he berated him for everything from his tardiness to his messy hair. The other students listened mutely.

Suddenly, Mr. Fisher stopped, thanked Dennis and turned to the other students — or rather, on them. He took them to task for having listened as he humiliated Dennis, for having said nothing even though they’d known it was wrong. “Why? Because I am a teacher? A figure of authority?” He had asked Dennis’s permission to do what he had, he told them, and went on to say that “Today, we begin our study of the Holocaust, the Second World War, and how it started.”

Wood had forgotten much about what she had learned in high school, she wrote, but she would always remember that morning in that class. “Mr. Fisher taught us to be accountable,” she wrote, “and not to be afraid to stand up when we knew something wasn’t right.”

I have heard McLean read that story no fewer than half a dozen times during repeat broadcasts — I am a huge fan of The Vinyl Café — and it moves me to tears each time.

He followed that story with one about an outhouse: It was the summer of 1960, the listener had written, and the outhouse at the family cottage had been equipped with a 45-gallon drum; his father figured it would take at least two years to fill. In fact, it was overflowing after only two months. But his father had a plan: to puncture the can, using the rifle he’d kept from his Second World War service, so the liquid in it would drain.

Just as he was about to squeeze the trigger, however, a gust of wind swung the outhouse door shut. A shot was heard — and his father staggered out, hands over his ears, “stunned and stinking.” His mother directed him to the lake, the outhouse was ruined and, perhaps needless to say, his father never fired anything in a closed space again.

Even if you hadn’t heard the story before, you kind of knew what was coming next. And as McLean described the goings-on that day in the outhouse, he got a serious case of the giggles: He began to laugh uncontrollably, snorting and gasping and having to stop to draw breath.

As scatological and silly as the story was, as much as I still had Mr. Fisher on my mind and all the Mr. Fishers who had, each in his own way, inspired me as a student, I found myself laughing uncontrollably, too.

White wrote that “there is a deep vein of melancholy running through everyone’s life.” People die too young. We feel alone sometimes. We all have our sadnesses.

But in the face of the melancholy, sometimes outhouses explode. And sometimes tears meet laughter.

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Susan Schwartz: Sometimes there is a fine line between laughter and tears

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